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Redefining Didactic Traditions: Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Discourses of Appropriation, 1749-1847

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Redefining Didactic Traditions: Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Discourses of Appropriation, 1749-1847 Redefining Didactic Traditions: Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Discourses of Appropriation, 1749-1847 by Kirstin Collins Hanley B.A. in English, The Pennsylvania State University, 2001 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Pittsburgh in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in English: Cultural and Critical Studies. University of Pittsburgh 2007 i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH School of Arts and Sciences This dissertation was presented by Kirstin Collins Hanley It was defended on May 24, 2007 and approved by Jean Ferguson Carr, Associate Professor, Department of English Don Bialostosky, Professor, Department of English Amanda J. Godley, Assistant Professor, Department of Instruction and Learning Dissertation Director: Stephen L. Carr, Associate Professor, Department of English ii Copyright © by Kirstin Collins Hanley 2007 iii Redefining Didactic Traditions: Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Discourses of Appropriation, 1749-1847 Kirstin Collins Hanley, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2007 This project examines the relationship between mid 18th/early 19th century feminism and didacticism through the work of one of the late 18th century’s most celebrated feminist writers, Mary Wollstonecraft. It is my contention that Wollstonecraft’s work is representative of the ways in which women writers of this period manipulated didactic conventions and strategies to further feminist goals. Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, often recognized as feminism’s “manifesto,” is generally regarded as the text that defines and delimits the scope of Wollstonecraft’s feminist project. Yet Wollstonecraft’s didactic texts, although generally dismissed in feminist critical contexts, further define and elaborate on her feminist project by promoting resistance to 18th century discourses concerning women’s ‘proper sphere.’ Reading Wollstonecraft’s work in relation to 18th century didactic traditions, I argue that Wollstonecraft appropriates and revises the work of 18th century writers on the subject of women’s education such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Dr. John Gregory, epitomizing a feminist didactic approach later (re)deployed by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. iv In the first chapter, I (re)read Wollstonecraft’s Vindication through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of authoritative discourse, generating a theoretical framework for understanding Wollstonecraft’s feminist discourse as appropriation. I suggest that Vindication enacts the same discursive strategies as Wollstonecraft’s didactic texts in its appropriation of established 18th century masculine discourses. In Chapters II and III, I situate Wollstonecraft’s didactic texts, The Female Reader, Original Stories, and Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in relation to didactic texts and traditions that shaped them, arguing that Wollstonecraft appropriates these texts and traditions in order to establish a feminist pedagogical approach. Chapters IV and V examine the continuities between Wollstonecraft’s didactic approach and the work of Austen and Brontë. They, like Wollstonecraft, borrow from and appropriate earlier didactic texts and traditions in order to construct their feminist projects. The very different ways in which Austen and Brontë (re)work these traditions, I suggest, reveals a shift in feminist thought from the late 18th through the mid 19th centuries. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...............................................................................................viii PREFACE: (RE)READING DIDACTICISM ..............................................................x 1.0 (RE)READING A VINDICATION: FEMINIST DISCOURSE AS APPROPRIATION........................................................................................................... 1 2.0 (RE)READING THE FEMALE READER ................................................. 24 2.1 ESTABLISHING DIDACTIC CONVENTION: THE ENDEARING FATHER AND THE MORALIZING MENTOR ............................................... 31 2.2 THE FEMALE READER: RECONTEXTUALIZING CONVENTIONAL ADVICE ................................................................................ 41 3.0 ORIGINAL STORIES AND THOUGHTS ON THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS: “REFASHIONING” ‘EXPERT’ ADVICE....................................... 65 3.1 REFASHIONING ÉMILE: REDEFINING THE TERMS OF FEMININE VIRTUE ............................................................................................. 67 3.2 REFASHIONING A LEGACY: REDEFINING THE RULES OF CONDUCT.............................................................................................................. 82 4.0 WOLLSTONECRAFT’S “OTHER WOMEN:” FEMINIST PEDAGOGIES IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.. 93 vi 4.1 SOPHY AS “THE OTHER WOMAN” IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND SENSE AND SENSIBILITY....................................................................... 116 4.1.1 Pride and Prejudice as (Mis)behavior.......................................... 125 4.1.2 Feminist Pedagogy as Sense Vs. Sensibility................................. 136 5.0 19TH CENTURY FEMINIST PEDAGOGY AS ‘SELF MAKING:’ THE OTHER WOMAN AS SACRIFICE IN JANE EYRE. .............................................. 150 5.1 “A NEW SERVITUDE:” THE VILLAGE SCHOOLMISTRESS AS FEMINIST INDIVIDUALIST ............................................................................ 155 5.2 CHRISTIANITY RECONCEIVED: THE (RE)BIRTH OF FEMINIST INDIVIDUALIST ............................................................................ 170 5.3 BLANCHE AND BERTHA AS ‘THE BAD GIRLS:’ BAD TEMPER AND MADNESS AS (MIS)BEHAVIOR IN JANE EYRE............................... 179 5.4 THE OTHER WOMAN AS SACRIFICE: IS FEMINISM “A GOOD THING FOR WOMEN?”.................................................................................... 201 WORKS CITED............................................................................................................ 207 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Steve Carr, Jean Ferguson Carr, and Don Bialostosky for your careful comments and enthusiasm about my work. Thanks especially to Steve and Jean for mentoring me throughout my academic career at Pitt, and for helping me to realize that graduate school was a place where I belonged. Steve, thanks for your willingness to explain things—often many times, and for your consistent faith in my work as a graduate student over the years. Jean, as a woman in the field, you exemplify the type of professional I would like to become—successful in both scholarship and teaching, while still making time for other important things in life. Don, you have played an instrumental role in my progress towards completion, as you encouraged me to write the dissertation I wanted to write, for which I am grateful. I have often thought of what a smart decision I made in asking you to be part of my committee the first year you arrived. Thanks to Amanda Godley for taking on the role of my outside reader despite a multitude of other commitments. Amanda, I respect you as an educator and greatly appreciate your taking the time to read my work. viii Thanks to my parents for cultivating my interest in academics throughout my life. Thanks especially to my mom for reading and correcting all of my grade school English papers and encouraging me to develop as a writer in high school and college. Thanks to Alicia, for being such a good friend over the years. Your support and encouragement has helped me through the difficult moments. Thanks also to the other ‘exemplary female figures’ in my life—my sisters, Abi and Trina, for consistently reminding me that I have a life that has nothing to do with work and my friends, Ellen Gerber and Margy Stahr, for taking on the role of valued colleagues as well. Tim, thank you for always reminding me that ‘everything will be fine.’ I appreciate the fact that you have given me so much room to grow as a person and that you respect and support the career path I have chosen. Your emotional support has been instrumental to me throughout this process. ix PREFACE: (RE)READING DIDACTICISM In the following pages I have endeavored to point out some important things with respect to female education. It is true, many treatises have been already written; yet it occurred to me, that much still remained to be said. —Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters I had been toiling for nearly an hour with Miss Lister, Miss Marriott and Ellen Cook, striving to teach them the distinction between an article and a substantive…In the afternoon; Miss Ellen Lister was trigonometrically oecumenical about her French lessons…If those girls knew how I loathe their company, they would not seek mine as they do. —Charlotte Brontë, Roe Head Journal —Oh! Dear Fanny, Your mistake has been one that thousands of women fall into…There are such beings in the World perhaps, one in a Thousand, as the Creature You & I should think perfection…but such a person may not come in your way, or if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a Man of Fortune, the Brother of your particular friend, & belonging to your own Country.—Think of all this Fanny. —Jane Austen, Letters In 1983, Jan Fergus remarked on what she saw as the modernist turn from didacticism as a way of understanding and interpreting literary structure and conventions, as she suggests “the classical dictum, still operative in eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century fiction, that literature should delight and instruct, has since been largely abandoned or qualified beyond recognition, and few words used
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